Bruce Clay Discusses Content-Centric Search

Content-centric search—what is it and how does it work? That was the topic of conversation in our most recent video interview with blogger and SEO-extraordinaire Bruce Clay.

In the conversation, Bruce explained that search engines are constantly trying to improve user experience and one of the most important factors that goes into a positive online experience is the ability to find and access quality content. No longer will blackhat strategies work to boost your search rankings, instead, creating valuable, compelling, and web-friendly content is the best way to improve your search visibility in the wake of Google’s latest algorithm updates.

When we asked Bruce if he thought that search was becoming more content-centric, he replied, “Absolutely. Over the recent period, I’d say this last year and a half, what we’ve found is Google’s been coming up with penalties for quality of content, and obviously you have the one hand where the quality is now a more important factor in whether or not you rank, and the other hand you find that links that are unnatural are getting penalized. And what we find is that in order to attract links, you actually have to have content worth linking to.”

Bruce elaborated on this concept of the necessity to create and share quality content by saying that it’s no longer good enough for sites to simply write up a short post, attach some keywords to it, and publish it. “Content has changed,” he said, “and how it’s being perceived by both the visitor, who is becoming more sophisticated, and the search engine, which is far more sophisticated. So from an SEO point of view, yeah, I’d say that there has been a rather significant shift, and that SEO is becoming much more content centric.”

After describing the recent shift in search engine preferences, Bruce offered up some advice on getting your site to rank based on its content, and how to develop a content-centric search strategy that will boost your search visibility and ranking.

“Where a lot of people don’t understand content factoring to this is having 100 great pages and 100 terrible pages—they average, when the quality being viewed is your website,” he explained. “So, it isn’t enough to have 100 great pages if you still have 100 terrible ones, and if you add another 100 great pages, you still have the 100 terrible ones dragging down your average. In some cases we have found that it’s much better, to improve your ranking, to actually remove or rewrite the terrible ones than add more good ones.”

To learn more about content-centric search and some tips and tricks on how to improve your search rankings via content, make sure to watch the full interview at the top of the page.